Introduction
I spent my early childhood in Western Massachusetts (Amherst) and then moved to Cambridge at age 8. (My parents are not academics but they like living in college towns.) I was convinced I would leave the area for college, but instead I did my undergraduate work at Harvard, where I was a social studies concentrator and played in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. I then worked for four years at the Advisory Board Company, a health care research and consulting firm based in Washington, DC. I worked on the research side, doing qualitative research and writing and presenting reports on patient satisfaction, recruiting and retention of nurses, and other health care strategy issues.
I left the Advisory Board to attend business school at Stanford. At the time I was interested in gaining skills in economics and finance, to complement the "softer" skills and HR/OB knowledge I had picked up at the Advisory Board. But in the back of my head I also thought that while at Stanford I might figure out what people who taught at business schools actually did. During the second year of the MBA program, I enrolled in a doctoral seminar and several independent study courses to further develop my research interests and start learning about the field of OB. I started the Harvard program the fall after I graduated from Stanford.
My Research Interests
When I entered the program I was particularly interested in how and why practices from the for-profit sector were being adopted by foundations and nonprofits. I ended up studying how businesses were adopting social missions and the consequences this has internally—on employee behavior and commitment. I found that what really intrigued me was something about hybrid organizations more generally: What tensions emerge in organizations that combine social and financial missions? How are these tensions managed? My dissertation looked at these issues through a field study of employee behavior in a for-profit natural foods store.
The Organizational Behavior Program
I was initially attracted to the joint program in Organizational Behavior because it provided a solid grounding in a discipline (for me, sociology) combined with attention to studying real-world phenomena. I was also interested in doing field research and felt that the program would provide me with excellent training in this respect. Both of these aspects of the OB program turned out to be quite important and valuable to me. My "cohort" in OB was quite small but I developed strong relationships with students in other years and in other, closely related programs. I still have a regular research call with one of these people, and it is one of the most helpful avenues for moving my research forward. I also participated in a qualitative research working group where faculty and graduate students discuss work in progress. This was invaluable in helping me learn about how to do qualitative research and how to navigate the dissertation and journal writing process.
After HBS
I am an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the ILR School at Cornell, where I teach courses on organizational design, culture, and change. My research focuses on organizations with social missions, in particular on how mission serves as a form of control and on how organizations manage tensions that arise between social missions and financial objectives. I am still in close touch with a number of students and faculty from my time at HBS and these relationships are vital to my research.
Advice for prospective doctoral students
I'm not really sure this is advice, but I think that the joint program in OB works best for people who are entrepreneurial and comfortable living between two worlds (the two sides of the river). You have to learn to navigate the disciplinary world and the world of practice and to translate from one to the other.
